Adam Prudhomme
Editor
Greater Napanee council will consider waiving or reducing nearly $50,000 in development and impost fees to help support a new project by Lennox and Addington Interval House.
Sue Weir, executive director of L&A Interval House, appeared before council at their virtual meeting on May 11 to request the fees be waived or reduced following their purchase of an existing building that contains six apartments they intend to use for transitional housing for at risk youth.
Councillor John McCormack made the motion to defer a decision on waiving the fees, citing a desire to ask more questions to town staff.
“I thought more conversation certainly would have been a benefit to council in order to make a decision,” said McCormack. “Things that we couldn’t bring up publicly possibly but more questions that I had.”
Deputy Mayor Max Kaiser floated the idea of waiving the fees up front while attaching a sliding scale of repayment. If Interval House were to sell the building within the first five years, they’d be charged the full amount. The fee would then be reduced by 10 per cent every year after that and if it were sold anytime after 2036, there would be no repayment due. Kaiser rescinded his motion and supported McCormack’s motion to defer.
“It is a lot of money,” said Mayor Marg Isbester. “There’s no getting around it….But I tell you, we start trying to supply our services ourselves, (Interval House is) funded by a lot of government agencies and they’ve been in existence for a long time. I’m just hoping, and not just as the mayor, but I’m hoping as a resident that we can find a way to help them in some way, shape or form. I think the public is very much in favour of them being funded in some sort of way, they provide a service that we couldn’t provide.”
Launched as an organization to assist women and children fleeing domestic violence, L&A interval House has evolved over the years and is now expanding to help youths, considered to be age 16-29, of all genders.
“Having worked at Interval House for 23 years and 10 years before that addiction services, one of the things that’s existed as a gap in services for the entire duration of all the years I’ve been here has been a local solution to youth who require supportive housing,” said Weir. “I know there’s been 100 discussions about whether it makes sense for our youth to go Kingston or whether it makes sense for our youth to go to Belleville. But when we think about having durable outcomes for kids who want to remain in the community we really do require a certain level of care and engagement.”
Interval House was able to expand their outreach to at risk youth after successfully securing a federal grant to hire additional staff. That funding did not cover the purchase of the building.
“We were able to ascertain a good portion of the capital needed to take on this project so that’s been exciting,” said Weir. “Now kind of the work that we’ve been doing is really looking at how we engage people as our partners to make sure our kids are attached either to education or the workforce.”
The matter will appear as unfinished business in an upcoming meeting.
-Greater Napanee council will add its support to the Township of Rideau Lakes in objecting to proposed development charges stemming from a new French-language school being built in Kingston.
Rideau Lakes Mayor Arie Hoogenboom sent a letter to nearby councils to alert them to a $300 education development fee being attached to new dwellings to support the building of Conseil des écoles publiques de l’Est de l’Ontario. The fee would climb to $333 in subsequent years.
“I have to agree with mayor Hoogenboom from Rideau Lakes that this is patently unfair,” said Kaiser. “One of my personal opinions is we have a public school board and a separate school board, both of which deliver French language programming within the area that they serve. I don’t know why we need a French language board on top of that. Whether you like or not like the school boards, we have a perfectly good full immersion French language program right here in town at Prince Charles School. I know there are people who will see a need to go there but like Rideau Lakes I expect our numbers are fairly small yet this would see us slapping a $300 to $330 fee on every new residence created going forward and this is for one of four school boards.”
Isbester noted other schools might impose similar fees if they one is allowed to be applied.
“This could not only affect us to the east, but because of our location it could affect us to the west as well,” said Isbester. “We could have a board that would want to start tapping into the same development funds from the west. A suggestion might be strength in numbers. The treasurers are the ones that really have their eye on where the taxes go and development charges and everything else.”
To that end Isbester added a friendly amendment to Kaiser’s original motion, which was to send a letter to support Rideau Lakes. Isbester added that they seek input for each region’s treasurers as they draft their own letter to send to the province to voice their objections to the fees.
-Council accepted the resignation of Rennie Hutzler from the Greater Napanee BIA board of directors.
“I just wanted to point out that it is a little concerning that as part of Rennie’s resignation that she says ‘in my role as treasurer I have yet to approve a single invoice as per our constitution. I have fulfilled my role as treasurer and provided a report for every meeting and have found that items have been paid without board knowledge or treasurer approval.’ It is just concerning moving forward,” said councillor Ellen Johnson.
Council’s BIA rep, councillor Bob Norrie, agreed there was a lack of communication with the invoices but having gone over them he said everything is ‘above board’ with the spending.
-Council passed a motion to declare June to be Deafblind Awareness Month at the request of Sherry Grabowski of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
Along with shining a blue light on the Napanee River falls, the town is also allowing the CNIB to host a global yarn bombing initiative at Springside Park next month.
According to the CNIB, a yarn bomb is a form of street art where ‘yarn that is knit, crochet, or wrapped, adorns an object in a public space.’
The project will be led by members of the deafblind community and aims to raise awareness of deafblindness as a ‘unique disability and to influence for appropriate services for people who are deafblind around the world.’ The group adds they will clean up after the event is complete.
-Greater Napanee’s General Manager Financial Services/Treasurer Paul Dowbar highlighted that the town had secured 100 per cent funding combined from the federal and provincial government for a $50,000 addition of HVAC and air purification at the North Fred Hall. An additional $10,000 in finding was also secured for the installation of a new customer service counter at the Strathcona Paper Centre.
-In a pair of formal housing keeping items, council voted to officially approve the Gibbard District site plan as well as to adopt the tax rates for 2021 with a total operating and capital cost of $13,307,033.
-Isbester closed the open session of the meeting by making special mention of Michelle King, executive office administrator and HR coordinator as she celebrated her 40th year of working for the Town of Greater Napanee.